Are you living the life you wanted when everything seemed possible?

By David McElroy · November 28, 2018

I doubt anybody grows up wanting to be a garbage man. Or an accountant. Or a medical billing coder.

There might be a few. Maybe some kids thought riding on a garbage truck was the coolest thing they had ever seen. Maybe some math-obsessed kids thought it would be amazing to spend all day running numbers through spreadsheets.

When we were kids, most of us had things we thought we wanted to do when we grew up, even if many of those things were impractical. When I was very young, I wanted to be captain of a starship, just like my only hero, Capt. James T. Kirk. In an era of frequent rocket launches and trips to the moon, it seemed possible to me.

Then I wanted to be an engineer and inventor. I’ve told you about these before. I progressed through law and ministry and several other things. I was certain that I would one day be president of the United States. I was incredibly excited about my future. I wanted to do and be everything. I was going to change the world.

Some of my dreams were unrealistic, but they all shared one thing. They were choices that had to do with things which my heart longed to do. But somewhere along the way, I started doing what people were willing to pay me to do instead. I lost track of what made my heart happy. At some point, I gave up and started trying to fit into molds made by other people.

At every major change in my working life, I can point to someone who recruited me for something. I never asked for a job in newspapers. I was approached and offered a job. Even after working part-time for a newspaper in college, I didn’t intend to do it for long, but someone recruited me to be managing editor of another small newspaper. That led to another job at a daily, which led to being managing editor at that daily.

I never intended to be a political consultant. I just managed one campaign for a friend and then other people started asking to hire me. Soon, I was making too much to walk away. Even with the real estate work I’m doing today, a long-time friend recruited me to help fix some problems with his new company and he encouraged me to get my license.

In some respects — most respects, if I’m honest — I’ve taken the path of least resistance rather than charted the course I wanted.

Yes, I can point to moments of initiative. I started a couple of small newspapers with little other than some news expertise and youthful arrogance. I had other plans on the drawing board that I had to give up when my father’s embezzling issues came out and killed my company.

But for the most part, I can draw a bright line between the time when I was actively planning what I wanted to do — making concrete plans to do specific things — and the time when I started simply accepting the opportunities that fell into my lap.

At some point, I quit trying to be myself. I allowed my need for money to turn me into a prostitute who did things I didn’t enjoy doing, things which what other people wanted done.

A few nights ago, a friend sent me a short animated film called “Happiness.” The director says it’s, “The story of a rodent’s unrelenting quest for happiness and fulfillment.” But I like to think it’s a story that most of us share — about how we get distracted by the pursuit of things we think we want, until we find ourselves somewhere we never intended to be. (I’ve embedded it below. It’s only about four minutes. I hope you’ll watch.)

As I thought about the story of the rat, it reminded me of one of my favorite short films, a six-minute animation called “More.” (I’ll embed it underneath the first short.) It’s about someone who reminds me a lot of myself. This character starts out with fire in his belly. He’s driven and wants to make something of himself, but he gets frustrated until he finds what he thinks is his opportunity. It makes him wildly successful, but he discovers that the fire which drove him has gone out — and all he still cares about is something of a surprise, maybe even to him. (I also think the music in this short is wonderful.)

Let me be really clear and honest. Life is easier after you give up and conform.

The world is far tougher on someone who’s trying to make his way on his own terms. You’re a lot more popular when you’ll choose a job from the choices someone else is offering you. You’ll be rewarded for going along with other people’s plans.

If you’re one of those who chooses from the available jobs — and if you happen to want to fit into one of those slots — that’s your business. We need people in this world to do all sorts of jobs which I would never be able to do — which I would never be satisfied doing.

But if you’re anything like me, you might be stuck at trying to reinvent yourself — at trying to figure out how to get the world to pay you to do the things you desperately need to do.

I know how to get the world to pay me to write what the people already want to read, but those things are not worth writing. I need to say things which most people don’t yet know they need to hear. I have a burning desire to help people discover new ways of living — ways that will require them to question what they’ve been taught and discover who they really are.

Nobody is begging for the art I need to make. Nobody is begging for the videos I’m going to make soon. Nobody is begging for what I write here. Nobody is begging for the books I will write. Nobody is begging for the films I will make. But I have faith that they will find a home and that people will pay me enough to make a good living by telling the truth as I see it.

During my best political years, I was making $150,000 a year, but I paid far too high an emotional and ethical price for that. I had to wander in the wilderness for a number of years after I left politics. I’m not back to where I used to be financially, but at least I’m stable.

I don’t know how long it will be, but I have faith that I’ll eventually do better financially doing what’s right for me than I ever did when I was doing what was wrong for me. Then the years of struggling will all have been worth it. And then nobody will be able to say that I gave up.

Note: This is indirectly related to something I wrote about a year ago called “Who were you before someone told you who you were supposed to be?“

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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